touch and go.
Now that we’re away from the planet there doesn’t seem to be any real urgency to our flight. Of course, it was touch and go there for the last couple weeks, what with the limited space aboard these haulers and twelve billions people trying anything, literally anything, to get a spot.
Important people were left behind, too. People you would have thought would have made the cut, but somehow they were left there standing in the wake of our ascent pulses, being burned alive because moments before they were clawing at the outer hull trying to scratch their way into the last of the ships exiting the planet.
There could be worse ways to go, I suppose. Maybe it really was the best choice, and maybe if I hadn’t made that cut, experienced cattle handlers wanted for deep space voyage, it would have been me standing out there begging to go and taking a facefull of ionized vapors as the better alternative to the chaos that was surely to follow, was following, in the short while after the ships left the Earth behind.
The planet was doomed after all. Or, at least, the people on the planet are doomed. The planet will probably be just fine in a few thousand years, humanity forgotten.
I dunno. I like to think I would have taken it better than that, maybe sat on the crest of the old hill on the west quarter, rolling grasslands at my back and watching the sun set over the mountains with a cold beer in my hand. That wouldn’t be a bad way to go either.